The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Perhaps the feminist movement of the 1970s has somewhat daunted today’s rich women, and made them wonder whether they have merely become interesting anachronisms, whether the terms “philanthropist,” “patroness of the arts,” and “social leader” have become passé. Who today, for example, would have the temerity of Alida Chanler Emmet, who, when her friend Stanford White designed a house for her which she didn’t like, moved out of it and hired another architect, Charles Platt, to design and build a new one? “You can design my barns,” she told White. And he did. In any case, members of the Old Breed today are very few and, of course, getting on in years.

  Nevertheless, there are still women who are trying to be grandes dames, and who seem to believe in the concept. Even more interesting is the fact that dedication to the special principles of American upper-class values—those values which must never be given voice, but must always be observed—has not died out. Not entirely. The American upper class still believes that a certain amount of time and money should be devoted to bettering the lot of the ill and needy; that an appreciation of painting and music and other beautiful things should be both shared with, and taught to, the general populace—that in art lies the power to uplift and purify the human tribe; that there is such a thing as noblesse oblige, and that the French usually had a better term for everything; that, when an occasion arises, one rises to it with the upper lip stiff; that gallantry and style will usually carry the day.

  And so, as long as there are women around who subscribe to such notions, our very peculiar and particular brand of American aristocracy may survive, however long it may remain untitled. The nobility will oblige.

  Image Gallery

  1. Eva and her first husband, Oliver Cromwell, with their three children in 1898. As the wife of a descendant of the Oliver Cromwell, Eva rose straight to the heart of New York’s prominent Four Hundred.

  Eve Roberts Stotesbury

  2. After Cromwell’s death in 1910, Eva married Philadelphia’s Edward T. Stotesbury, a banking genius and partner of J. P. Morgan. Though an outsider in the snobbish world of proper Philadelphia, Eva soon became a hostess without peer; her personal Versailles was Whitemarsh Hall.

  3. “He taught me how to live,” Eva said of the art dealer Joseph Duveen who was the grand monsieur behind so many American art-buying grandes dames between 1886 and 1939. “My dear woman,” he told his clients, “when you are buying something that is priceless, no price is too high!”

  4. Eva’s name appeared regularly on “best dressed” lists. Her jewels were worthy of an empress, and enemies falsely claimed she paraded guests past her entire collection displayed in glass cases.

  5. The Stotesburys’ El Mirasol was the largest villa in Palm Beach, where they ruled as the winter colony’s acknowledged social leaders.

  6. Eva’s favorite charity was what she called “the personal kind.” At Christmas in 1930, she and Ned gave presents to the poor children at Staff Garden Recreation Center.

  Eve Roberts Stotesbury

  7. Eva and Ned on the lawn at the wedding of Leta Sullivan and Lt. A. T. Barberini of the Italian Military Mission to the U.S.A. Eva was considered eminently gracious in an era when graciousness meant a great deal.

  8. John Lowell Gardner of Boston, whom Isabella Stewart married in 1860.

  9. Belle Gardner so admired John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Mme. Gautreau, Madame X, that she commissioned the artist, shown here, to paint her own portrait in 1887.

  10. Bernard Berenson, the renowned specialist in the Italian Renaissance, taught Belle to buy art selectively and carefully. She in turn financed his travels and study in Europe; meeting her exacting standards was part of his training. Her other protégés included George Santayana and T. S. Eliot.

  Isabella Stewart Gardner

  11. Marion Crawford, another of her “finds,” renounced a career as an opera singer on Belle’s advice and became a successful novelist and a fixture at her salon. Belle fell head over heels in love with him.

  12, 13. Portrait of Isabella by Sargent (12). When originally shown to the public, it caused comments that Sargent had portrayed more of Belle’s poitrine than was entirely proper, and her outraged husband withdrew it from exhibition. The work is now one of the centerpieces of her museum in Boston. The center courtyard, north, of Fenway Court (13), designed by Willard Sears and Isabella. In Back Bay, Boston, she created an Italian palazzo and filled it with great works of art. It became The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, her gift to the city.

  14. The Tragedy of Lucretia, which Berenson acquired for Belle at the astonishingly low price of $16,000, was the first Botticelli ever to hang in an American collection.

  15. Isabella soon after the opening of Fenway Court in 1930. Though far from beautiful, Belle was considered one of the most brilliant, charming, and attractive women on earth.

  16. Julius Rosenwald quickly rose from meager means to enormous riches as one-quarter owner of Sears, Roebuck & Co. The older children, Lessing, Adele, and Edith, remembered poverty; the two younger, Marion and Bill, knew nothing but luxury.

  17. Of all the children, Edith was temperamentally most like her father—she got things done. Effie was her nickname; it stood, her family said, for Efficiency.

  18. Edith Rosenwald married Edgar Bloom Stern of New Orleans. They had three children, Edgar, Jr., Audrey, and Philip; but she still found time to tackle the city’s power structure and was the prime force in organizing voter registration for black people.

  19. Longue Vue was designed by William Platt for Edith in the Classical tradition, drawing on examples of Greek Revival buildings in Louisiana. Edith donated the house and its magnificent gardens to New Orleans, and every detail has been preserved as it was when Edith lived there.

  Edith Rosenwald stern

  20, 21. Edith’s greatest pride was in being honored by her adopted city. In 1965, she was awarded the New Orleans Times-Picayune Loving Cup, presented annually to the citizen deemed to have done the most for the city. The cup’s image is embossed on her tombstone.

  22, 23. Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s parents, John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the fortune, and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family was German, but Edith preferred to believe herself descended from the noble de La Rochefoucauld family of France. She occasionally signed her letters “Edith de la Rockefeller.”

  24. The four Rockefeller children: Bessie, Edith, Alta, and John. A demure, shy child, Edith showed few signs of becoming a future grande dame. Her marriage to Chicago’s Harold McCormick of the reaper fortune merged two great American families.

  25. Edith believed herself the reincarnation of the child bride of King Tutankhamun.

  26. It was to Carl Jung in Switzerland that Edith—unhappy in her marriage, no doubt bored and depressed by her life—decided to commit herself for eight years of therapy.

  27. In the years after the death of her elder son, Edith seemed increasingly eccentric. She built a huge forty-room mansion called Villa Turicum in suburban Lake Forest but never moved in.

  Edith Rockefeller McCormick

  28. Harold McCormick was usually referred to as “the rich playboy” in the newspapers. He divorced Edith in 1922, underwent a rejuvenative gland transplant, and married the Polish soprano Ganna Walska, whose career, sponsored by her new husband, was an unmitigated disaster (28).

  29. Edith with Edwin Kren (29). She supported him, but their relationship was entirely chaste. His duties were to help her realize her dream of awakening Chicago to the wonders of psychoanalysis. They planned to convert Villa Turicum into a clinic.

  30, 31. Few women in American history have managed to conceal their pasts as successfully as Arabella (30). While passing as his “niece,” she was the mistress of C. P. Huntington for nearly fifteen years. Collis Potter Huntington (31) was the mastermind behind the enormous Central Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads. He was a man of stupendous wealth who kept his first wife so totally in the background that most people did no
t know he was married.

  32. The Moorish salon in Arabella’s first “important” house, at 4 West 54th Street in New York City. Huntington paid for it in cash, and she, though self-educated, decorated it so successfully that her rooms are currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York and the Brooklyn Museum.

  33. On July 12, 1884, nine months after the death of his wife, C. P. made Arabella Yarrington Worsham the second Mrs. Collis Potter Huntington. It was a smallish ceremony, and the next morning the newspapers put their formal imprimatur on her utter respectability.

  34, 35, 36, 37. Henry Huntington (35) nephew of the late C. P., built Rancho San Marino (34) in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles to lure his beloved Arabella to the West Coast. When they eventually married, they assembled at San Marino one of the most important private collections of rare books and art in the world. Its contents, including Gainsborough’s Blue Boy (36), were to become the Huntington Art Museum. They lived in the house only a month or so every year. Where Arabella (37) led, her adoring Henry followed.

  Arabella Worsham Huntington

  38, 39, 40, 41. Eleanor Robson (38), the third generation of a minor theatrical family, was an overnight star at 17. At 25, she captivated G. B. Shaw (39) when she starred in Merely Mary Ann in London (40). “I am forever yours devotedly,” he wrote, and created Major Barbara for her. Also captivated was the socially prominent multimillionaire August Belmont, Jr., recently widowed (41). Twenty-seven years her senior, he obviously adored her.

  42, 43. “It was another world,” Eleanor wrote of her new life as a budding grande dame. She shared her husband’s enthusiasm for racehorses, naming the Belmont horse Man o’ War, and she frequently held trophies while victorious team captains drank (42). During World War I, she traveled extensively both in the United States and abroad for the Red Cross. In 1934 she was given the Gold Medal, its highest honor (43).

  Eleanor Robson Belmont

  44. Her husband died in 1924, leaving her a beautiful widow at 45, but not a breath of scandal ever touched her name. Cecil Beaton perfectly captured her in her greatest role of grande dame (44)

  45. Known as “the woman who single-handedly saved the Met,” she created the Metropolitan Opera Guild to guide the company through the Great Depression. Her photo appeared on the cover of Opera News, the official publication of the Guild, in celebration of her 100th birthday, although she in fact died two months short of that date (45).

  46. Ima, named after the heroine in an uncle’s epic poem, bore her name proudly, even defiantly. Her brothers, Tom and Mike, each had at one time or another to fight people who ridiculed her name. When she became the acknowledged “First Lady of Texas,” she was known throughout the state as “Miss Ima,” or “Mizima.”

  47. The lovely Ima never married. “I am fatally attracted to handsome men,” she would say, “and I know if I had married, I would have picked a handsome husband who was worthless.” She took herself to New York to study music, then traveled unchaperoned to Germany. Rolled up in her bag on her return were the canvases, still cheap at that time, of the Post-Impressionists that she bought in Europe.

  48. Her father, James Stephen Hogg, was elected Governor of Texas when she was eight. The death of her mother forced little Ima to serve as his hostess, presiding over formal dinners, teas, and receptions. As Governor, “Big Jim” set a strong example for Ima by fulfilling his campaign promises for economic reform.

  49, 50, 51. Miss Ima’s home, Bayou Bend, in Houston housed her great art collection. In her youth, she developed an interest in American antiques and decorative pieces at a time when the affluent bought French, English, and Italian collectibles. Bayou Bend was the scene of her famous dinner parties where much that “needs correcting,” as she put it, was set to rights. In 1966 she turned Bayou Bend over to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and its Director Emeritus, James Chillman (50). Her 90th birthday was celebrated with a special concert by the Houston Symphony Orchestra, which she founded in 1913, and sustained with her Symphony Society until her death at 93 in 1975. At her party, she downed her customary quota of man-sized bourbon old-fashioneds, and sang and played the piano (51).

  Ima Hogg

  52. Mary Emery was soft-spoken, gentle, domestic, and retiring, more than a little shy. As the richest woman in Cincinnati, she embarked upon an extraordinary 31-year career in philanthropy.

  53. Charles J. Livingood’s uncanny resemblance to Mary’s dead son, his Harvard classmate, won him the job of right-hand man. He managed her business affairs and civic projects for the rest of her life, and theirs was a perfect working relationship.

  54. Annie Sinton Taft exchanged daily “breakfast letters” with Mary, her best friend, to decide that day’s benefactions. Gossips believed them enemies because if one supported a project, the other withdrew.

  Mary Hopkins Emery

  55, 56. In 1923, Mary broke ground for her most ambitious project. Attempting to rid Cincinnati of slums, she built Mariemont, a model community, to provide a good life for the poor. The homes and apartments were leased for low rents with an option to buy. During the Depression, the middle class took possession. Mary Emery died in 1927 at age 83, but the town was not completed until 1965.

  Bibliography

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  Amory, Cleveland, The Last Resorts. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1948.

  ——, Who Killed Society? New York: Harper, 1960.

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  Index

  Academy of Music, New York, 18

  Adams, Abigail, 55–56

  Adams, Brooks, 56

  Adams, Henry, 56

  Adams, James Truslow, 58

  Adams, John, 56

  Adams, John Quincy, 56

  Adopt-a-Family Committee, 241

  Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation, 282

  Allom, Charles, 36

  Always Room at the Top (Walska), 139
, 142–43

  American Medical Association, 140

  American Oil Treating and Hardening Company, 158

  American Register, 201

  American Tobacco Company, 45

  Anderson, Marian, 103, 111

  Aquitania, 138–39

  Arizona (Thomas), 228

  art:

  American Renaissance in, 74–75, 282

  for art’s sake, 131

  Boston society’s views on, 67, 68

  European patrons of, 67

  New York society’s views on, 18

  tastes in, 217

  art collections, American:

  American Renaissance represented in, 74–75, 282

  dealers for, 220, 241

  of European works, 59, 211–12

  fraud and forgery in, 240–41

  French and Italian works favored in, 59